Correction: the C64 and Spectrum died in France, but nowhere else. In fact, the CPC 464 was available in my country as well and... Almost no one bought it, they all bought C64's or Spectrums instead. It got so bad, the machine vanished from the shops altogether years before the C64 stopped selling.

Of course This situation was specific to France and nowhere else.

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I did a little test with the C64 version of Arkanoid and Operation Wolf. The Arkanoid original I had failed (the disk was bad), but the cracked copy loaded in 1min 25secs.

OK, 1mn25s is the time needed for me to load Turrican II compact tape version game menu and then level 1-1.

A game like Operation Wolf on CPC, original disk release takes 14 seconds to load (i have monitored the time needed).

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Unless I used my fast loader cart (Final Cartridge III - which is pure software, there is no hardware upgrade for the disk in there) in which case it loaded in just 9 seconds. Not minutes, seconds. That really is fast enough.

You need a special cart on c64 to achieve what a CPC can do in term of loading speed. Operation Wolf CPC disk version loads very fast without anything needed.

Nota : A level in OpWolf needs 3 seconds to load on CPC.

Also don't forget that the CPC graphics are bigger to load than the c64 ones.

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The Operation Wolf original I had loaded from disk, not using any carts, in ~27 seconds. Which is not really that slow either - many Amiga/ST etc games loaded longer than that.

That's almost twice the time needed to load the CPC version.

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In other words, loading times on the C64 could be bad, but normally weren't.

The c64 used slow 5 1/4" floppy disk drives. The CPC 3" inches drives, is basically running at the same speed than a 3.5" floppy drive of an ST or an Amiga.

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Just like the Amstrad games on tape sometimes took over 25 minutes to load.

Yes and no. Most CPC games on tape on average do not exceed 13 minutes of data to load.

Any game with no multiload is basically 8-10 minutes long only.

When you go higher, it's multiloader games with fast loading scheme.

However, games taking 20 minutes and more on c64 are more often encountered (Commando for instance, is an horror to load on c64!)

Because of the game size, not because of the protected loader scheme speed used.

I can tell it to you because i have dump myself more than 1000 amstrad CPC tapes. Games taking this much time use already fast schemes.

The game with the longest size to load on Amstrad CPC is the game hydra from Domark. It uses a very fast speedlock tape protection, and is spanned on 2 tapes, with a length of 1 hours of tape band to play per side !

The game is in 16 colors mode and is 875kb of data crunched ! that's basically the 16 bits version of the game on an 8 bits machine lol.

I know no game needing 20 minutes to load from start to the main menu of the game.

In order to be sure, i have done some tests by load games at the same time between my CPC 464 and my C64.

My c64 games always finish to load the last. The CPC version of the game is always loaded first.

In fact, you can have a game with only 8 minutes of band to play, but if the loading scheme is slow, it can take 20 minutes to load. And out of the specific Cartridge game for the C64, the Disk and Tape I/O are very slow on this computer.

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Denis, i respect your passion for the CPC, i just hope you can respect mine about the C64.

Disagree with somebody doesn't mean it's a disrespect or even that you don't care about the person you disagree with. It's sane to have some disagreement with people !

Being always OK and that's fine and all, all the time is not bringing anything.

I own myself a C64, for which i have the tighiest care because i know how fragile this hardware is. I have even bought the sav64 overvoltage protector for a reason, i don't want it to die due to the crap commodore PSU !

(to be honest more than with my CPCs. For instance, the C64 is capacitors city, while the CPC have almost none, it's tank built !).